StartupBus Winners Revealed, Head To SXSW [Video]

Seven teams that created startups in just 72 hours while on a bus headed to San Antonio pitched their ideas yesterday to a panel of celebrity tech judges at Rackspace’s Castle headquarters. The top two StartupBus Buspreneur Battle finalists[1] will compete tonight at the StartupBus All-Star Finals against two teams from the StartupBus Alumni bus and two teams selected by an online audience. The final competition is tonight at Champions[2] Sports Bar & Restaurant in Austin, which is Rackspace’s headquarters during SXSW Interactive[3].

Watch the video (shot and edited by Rackspace videographer Jacob Forbis) to see how the startup competition stacked up and who took the crown:

Here are the seven teams that participated in yesterday’s competition:

CareerMob[4]: CareerMob is a platform that connects employers with job-seeking military veterans. The site enables veterans to identify the skillsets necessary to succeed in their careers of choice, as well as provide them with information on academic training programs that help them become certified to work in the civilian world.

grassroots.io[5]: To the developers of this startup “there’s a big problem in this country, and that problem is the government.” grassroots.io is a viral platform for political advocacy that helps mobilize grassroots efforts through the click of a mouse. The web site automatically generates tweets, emails and Facebook posts for a certain political issue that connects users to their specific legislative representatives.

ghostPOST[6]: ghostPOST is an anonymous live chat service that saw 5,000 page views in 61 countries within 48 hours of its launch. The startup team said that the web site is programmed to randomly generate up to 300,000 usernames that will keep the conversations going.

USupplyMe[7]: USupplyMe reinvents the relationship between buyers and suppliers. The web site allows individuals looking for certain goods to post a “wanted” ad that is visible to several potential suppliers who can offer competitive prices for that particular item.

Exversion[8]: The creators of Exversion think data is sexy, so they created a startup to share the sexiness with other developers and data professionals. Three days ago, the team launched a web site that aggregates and publicly distributes thousands of open datasets for free. Exversion also provides an API for application developers to manage and integrate different versions of each dataset into their own projects.

NextChaptr[9]: Book publishing is often a high-risk undertaking that involves significant financial investment. With Nextchaptr, the risk for publishers is eliminated. The startup team created a web site that allows the public to filter story ideas and commit to purchase a book before its publication.

cloudspotting[10]: Cloudspotting is a creative tool that enables users to virtually draw or paint over stock images of clouds. The site allows artists to “make the sky their canvas.”

StartupBus is just one of many events Rackspace is participating in around SXSW Interactive 2013[11]. And if you want to find us on Twitter, be sure to keep an eye on the hash-tag #SXRackspace[12].